Daddy, Father Frost is Dead

‘What is life? What is death? Does man have the right to call himself `alive’, just because he moves, consumes food and produces sounds? If that is so, then is life no more than a sequence of convulsions, while death is a mysterious process of true movement?’ (Yevgeni Yufit) These questions are the basis of Daddy, Father Frost is Dead, which is loosely based on Tolstoy’s story The Vampire Family. It is a kind of horror film with ironic and poetic turns (‘Necrorealism’). A handicapped man and his adolescent son symbolise different yet related times. The father is a symbol for the past, the son an ‘agent of the future’. The father, who is obsessed with writing a treatise about a new kind of mouse, witnesses a number of bizarre and frightening events: his son commits suicide, respectable middle-aged men partake in S&M and his family cherishes psycho-morbid preoccupations. According to Yufit, the film should be regarded as a message about a hidden, ‘mental’ illness. As in many of his films, there is plenty of nature, albeit nature on its last legs. The issue of ecology is treated as a paradox here. Nature is only a picture of superficial beauty hiding decay and deterioration.